On Purgatory
Two down, one to go, on getting back the proper Holy Days of Obligation here in England and Wales, as kept by most of the rest of the world, including the Pope. Astonishingly, the Sacred Heart, the date of which is based on that of Corpus Christi, is still being kept on the right day, i.e., next Friday. Do they just not know, or something?
Do many Catholics still believe in transubstantiation? Well, if such things were ever taught in Catholic schools, then more of them might. But anyway, so what? What matters is that the Church teaches it. Catholics who dissent from the Teaching of the Church are just wrong, objectively speaking. That is all that there is to it. Only the Catholic Church provides such objectivity, which is perfectly encapsulated in transubstantiation. It was only from Christianity in general, and from Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that some propositions were just plain true, so that others were just plain false. And it was only from Christianity in general, and from Catholicism in particular, that science acquired the idea that there was an investigable order in the universe; even if that order is a law of chaos, then the point still stands.
Faced with a changed intellectual environment that denies those foundations rather than simply presupposing them, then science must return to the system that first asserted them in the midst of a former such environment. That system is Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. Thus, for example, by affirming the objective existence of the substance distinct from the accidents, transubstantiation also affirms the objective existence of the accidents, which are the objects of scientific investigation. Transubstantiation is the bulwark against the Postmodern assault on science. Nothing else is.